2016 - January

Industrial Internet of Things (IOT) is a distributed network of smart sensors that enables precise control and monitoring of complex processes over arbitrary distances. The great advantage of the industrial IoT is counterbalanced by a security weakness. The insertion of a smart device capable of extracting protected data or malicious actions can infect the whole network with relative ease. Thus it becomes imperative to discover whether or not new devices have the right capabilities and compatibilities with other sensors. This article presents a zero knowledge protocol that achieves precisely that objective while keeping the sensor data private.

Cyber-attacks and breaches are often detected too late to avoid damage. While "classical" reactive cyber defenses usually work only if we have some prior knowledge about the attack methods and "allowable" patterns, properly constructed redundancy-based anomaly detectors can be more robust and often able to detect even zero day attacks. They are a step toward an oracle that uses knowable behavior of a healthy system to identify abnormalities. In the world of Internet of Things (IoT), security, and anomalous behavior of sensors and other IoT components, will be orders of magnitude more difficult unless we make those elements security aware from the start. In this article we examine the ability of redundancy-based anomaly detectors to recognize some high-risk and difficult to detect attacks on web servers---a likely management interface for many IoT stand-alone elements. In real life, it has taken long, a number of years in some cases, to identify some of the vulnerabilities and related attacks. We discuss practical relevance of the approach in the context of providing high-assurance Web-services that may belong to autonomous IoT applications and devices.